scifiworldbuildingfandomcom-20200215-history
Radiance-Class dreadnought destroyer
Overview After the Grand Duchy built the Nightmare class dreadnought in 332 DoS the United Cantium Conglomerate (UCC) decided to take a look at what the largest possible dreadnought type ship they could build would look like. Novadora drive yard heavy industry was contracted to present such a ship. The resulting ship called the Radiance is the largest warship in the whole of the Aetherian. The Radiance was so large that if it were built it would require all the dry docks around Cantium prime pushed together over 10 years to assemble it; this is before considering time for gathering resource required for it. It would also take over half the annual navy budget just for its maintenance. For obvious reasons the design was turned down, however its sheer size and dramatic power caused it to stick in public memory and was at one point the Federation of Cathlium attempted to ban warships above a certain size threshold, sighting the Radiance as their chief example. Design The Radiance was built with the mindset that it would have 6 primary coil guns and would require significant secondary armament. 600mm guns were chosen to be the primary secondary armament as that is the largest round size on the Nightmare class, however the design team putting together the turret design decided to double the amount of guns on the turret from 3 to 6 and also increased the 150mm cannons to a 4 gun system. The head design team also wanted to compete with the Republic of Judecen ship types by adding 240mm guns to it. Point-defense guns were moved from machine gun rounds to ball laser weapons near the bow of the ship in order to save weight that would be shifted around as they chewed through ammo. As the ships design became larger and larger to make the main guns more and more powerful the design team realized that the ship exceeded the largest possible ATD that could be built in the whole of Aetherian, so it would require two of the largest ATD's to move it at even a modest 4 light years per day. A sacrifice that would cause such an unstable warp field that surprise jumps would be radically impossible. As one member of the design staff pointed out "It would be like having a submarine 10 meters bellow the water with a heavy metal orchestra on loud speakers playing 24/7." In order to power this behemoth of unwieldy metal 8 high power fusion reactors were needed. At max power the ship could crew through a large lakes worth of hydrogen in less then a day. As one of the representative's of the UCC board of design stated "You could build nearly a million nukes using the same amount of hydrogen that a Radiance would consume in a single battle. You could build enough Victory class carriers to win a war against the Mass Alliance with all the metal needed. Or you could build an armada of none-capital ships large enough to fight the whole of Aetherian for the same price." The ship was so hilariously over powered as it was impractical. The article of reasons the UCC provided Novadora drive yard heavy industry for rejecting the design consisted of over 12,000 pages though Novadora drive yard heavy industry suggested that they could have fit the major reasons on a 3 inch by 3 inch note that simply read: To big.